Stealing Harvard starts tomorrow. Looks dumb. But my primary reaction is an aghast “Tom Green got cast in another movie after Freddy Got Fingered”? I guess they figured that if they were going to green light this piece of schlock, they might as well go for the gold.
And while on the subject of questionable decisions in Tinsel Town, what’s with the movie “Ballistic, Ecks vs Sever”? Is it possible for them to have picked a stupider title for the movie? Why don’t they just come right out and title it “We know you’re only going to this movie to see Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu so we didn’t spend much time thinking about the plot.”?
I’m highly disappointed that Jason Lee is in it. While not at all a serious actor, I at least thought he had standards. His stuff has been pretty authentic and genuine.
Finagle, I was going to start a thread titled Does Jason Lee cancel out Tom Green?. I really like Jason Lee (how can you not like Brodie!?!) but I loathe Tom Green.
I guess I’ll watch Stealing Harvard on cable sometime next year.
From the commercials I’ve seen, Stealing Harvard does indeed look stupid. However, I’d thought the same thing when the previews for Freddy Got Fingered came out.
Yes, by saying that, I am owning up and declaring that I did enjoy Freddy, and no, I wasn’t on drugs at the time. People, help me – am I the only one? I think that Freddy is funniest if you view it as a sort of concept movie – the idea being that it’s the kind of film that would be produced if Tom Green was as big a moron in real life as his character was on screen. Remember the plot? An aspiring cartoonist is kicked out of his home and runs away to Hollywood to pursue his dreams? A capable writer could make an intelligent comedy on that plot. The genius of Tom Green, however, is that he asked himself: What would an unintelligent writer do with this material? What if, in actuality, I had ontological idiocy? If I were not only more idiotic than imagined, but more idiotic thatn could possibly be imagined? I remember one telling scene, the one where the premiere broadcast of the main character’s cartoon, Zebras in America, is announced. It’s shown as the lead television story on the BBC World Service. The anchorman, as perfectly serious as if he’s describing the pope’s funeral, has a faux-British pronunciation of “zehbras” (with a short “e”) that was the icing on the cake! You see? Though it’s imbecilic enough to imagine his dreadful cartoon would achieve international status, Green takes the next step – the clueless writer/actor knows that the English pronounce words differently from us North Americans, and “zebras” is a word, right? so the faux-British pronunciation is thrown in as a simulation of worldy wisdom! Brilliant! And the whole movie is like that.
Ah, well. It’s a cliche to say that genius is unrecognized in its own time. If Stealing is in the same vein, it’ll be more than worth my seven bucks.
Well, Scratch, even if FGF was a cinematic masterpiece, from the standpoint of the one thing that Hollywood cares about most, it was a devastating flop. According to the IMDB, the budget was 15 million, the first weekend’s take was around 7 million, and then in the succeeding weeks of its miserable existence, the film racked up maybe another 7 million in ticket sales. I don’t know what video rentals were like (word of mouth was so savage that probably a lot of people rented it out of curiosity) but given Hollywood’s tendency to complain that they lose money even on blockbusters, this had to go down as a royal financial asskicking.
The contrast between the first weekend’s take (2271 screens, $7M) and the ninth and last weekend (29 screens, $6,700) is pretty telling – this is not a film where people went back to relive the experience
I don’t know. Sucking a cow’s udder and eating bugs (Green) is more respectable than being a Scientologist (Lee), but of course that’s just my opinion. Also, I never liked any Kevin Smith movie. They seem to be a part of some pseudo-hip, condescending counter culture that I don’t embrace. Meh. Regarding Tom Green, Andy Kaufman was tremendously unpopular during his time. So much that he was literally voted off SNL for his entire life, all of the movies in which he appeared were failures, univerally panned and now he’s lauded as a comedic genius. I honestly suspect the same will hold true for Green. Finagle, check out the gross on some early Robin Williams or Adam Sandler films. Love or hate them, they’re still here. Why are you so surprised?
One more thing to think about: Tom Green is one of only three people who actually accepted a Golden Raspberry award (an awards show done every Oscar season commemerating the worst films of the year). He must have known Freddy Got Fingered stank.
(The other two are Paul Verhoven, director of Showgirls, and Bill Cosby, who won three for Leonard Part VI. However, Cosby might not count-he accepted them on a talk show, and the awards were made out of gold and marble. The normal award is a plastic raspberry on a Super-8 film reel spraypainted gold.)
Lauded by whom? Mainly by his cronies, it seems to me, mainly Bob Zmuda. And Kaufman wasn’t tremendously unpopular, rather he was tremendously misunderstood, I suppose is the best way to put it. For me, the whole Andy is/isn’t Tony Clifton and being confrontational just to embarass and piss people off school of comedy gets really old really, really REALLY quickly.
His movies were failures because the scripts sucked, plain and simple. Heartbeeps: 2 androids fall in love and comic mayhem ensues.
Sure, I’ll buy that…NOT!!
The thing about Kaufman which I find a bit disturbing is that his comedy tours of college campuses were only undertaken so that Kaufman could get laid.
That was it.
It wasn’t the money.
It wasn’t being in front of an audience and sharing his comic gifts:rolleyes:.
How about we just maroon Tom Green on a desert island, where he can’t attempt to entertain/annoy people through any performing medium?
Kaufman’s only interesting in his oddity, much of which seems to have been cultivated on purpose: the whole Andy/Tony Clifton gag, taking an audience out for milk and cookies, the wrestling obsession, etc. His buddies can claim he was groundbreaking in his blurring the lines between performance and reality, but is that just a way of saying he was an outsized personality with little conventional talent?
OK… I saw Stealing Harvard today, and it’s NOT THAT BAD!
I actually laughed several times during the movie.
Tom Green acts as basically the same moron/idiot character that he was in Freddy Got Fingered, but unlike FGF, he did not write this movie nor is he the entire focus. Coming in measured strains (he is playing the goofy/moron friend of the basically intelligent Jason Lee character) he is much easier to stomach.
It is a stupid comedy, but it does have a plot that makes sense. Sure, people do stupid and idiotic things, but this film is not attempting to be a high brow comedy, just an excuse for a plot that allows for much slapstick. Within the context of the movie, Tom Green is actually funny at times (although even I will admit his idiocy is groan-inducing and painful at other times - but unlike FGF, not for the entire movie!)
By the way, Finagle, the name of the Banderas - Liu movie is just Ballistic, not “Ballistic, Ecks vs Sever.” The “Ecks vs Sever” is printed on the posters as a promotional device, explaining the idea of the film (I believe it is the American agent, Banderas, against the Chinese agent, Liu, who also have to team up against some nefarious foe threatening us all. Or something.) But the actual title of the movie is just Ballistic.
And a note for anyone else who actually goes to see Stealing Harvard: stay 'till the end of the credits. After the last credit rolls, there is a long sequence of outtakes. Not that they are all that funny, but a few are sort of humerous in a bloopers kind of way and you’ll get your full “money’s worth”.
Really? Let’s play a little game then. Here is a link to the IMDb. And here is a link to the movie’s homepage. Now: find any mention wherein the movie is referred to as simply Ballistic.
Stealing Harvard, by the way, gets a whopping 10% on the Tomatometer. Compare this to the 9% that Freddie Got Fingered scored.
Let’s play another game. Take out the word “Ballistic.” Now, you have the film’s original title! They eventually added the “Ballistic.” I can also find no reference to it being simply Ballistic.
You have a point, but IMO, there was no “what if?” involved. He is an unintelligent and untalented writer, and he did have ontological idiocy. It was an idiot writing about an idiot, and in this case, “write what you know” didn’t work.
